Weer'd World

Via Miguel, gun control “Experts” seem to be having trouble rationalizing their false narrative:

Almost half the illegal guns seized and traced in Boston last year came back to manufacturers and dealers in Massachusetts, a startlingly high ratio for a state known for its tough gun laws.

In 2013, Boston police seized 509 handguns, some used in homicides, others simply possessed illegally. Of those guns, police were able to trace 326 to their original point of retail sale. Forty-six percent of them were originally purchased legally in Massachusetts, said Anthony Braga, a senior fellow at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government who analyzed the data for the Boston Police Department.

“The part that is concerning to me is that we have really good gun laws here,” Braga told police and city officials from across New England gathered at Roxbury Community College Thursday. “I don’t know if it’s a temporary blip or a trend, but it’s something that needs to be understood.”

…For years, the states north of Massachusetts — Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine — supplied a large number of the illegal guns found in Boston. Officials have said that looser restrictions in the northern states and in Southern states along the Interstate 95 corridor, such as Virginia and Georgia, made it easy for criminals in Boston to buy guns elsewhere that they typically would be unable to purchase in Massachusetts, where secondary gun sales must be reported to the state.

First “Really Good Gun Laws”? That little quip seems to go along with the crap about the “Iron Pipeline”. Have a look at the ATF trace data! These numbers have been virtually unchanged for all the years I’ve been watching them, and they’re the same for every state I look at.

The Majority of guns traced in crime are traced back to the state where the crime was committed, and the bulk of the remainder trace to neighboring states. The Key data is the average “Time-to-crime” ie: the last time the gun was legally transferred by an FFL is greater than TEN YEARS!

Anti-gun people will claim there is an “Iron Pipeline” where criminals leave states with heavy gun control and illegally buy guns to transport back to their state, but such a trafficking example would result in a relatively low “time-to-crime” number, since traffickers of any contraband want to quickly convert their illegal cargo to cash which is harder to get arrested for, and so they can repeat the process again. Same goes for straw-buyers, they buy the gun and quickly transfer it to the criminal. Sure years might go by without the criminal being caught, but we’re talking MAYBE 5-6 years, not the 14+ years the ATF is seeing in the data.

Really what this is is the lawful movement of legal gun owners with their guns in tow. When the gun is stolen, which is how most of the crime guns get into criminal hands, the gun will trace back to the state where it was bought YEARS ago. Heck I have a few guns that will trace back to Maine, and New Hampshire, as well as several other states. I didn’t buy my first gun until I had moved to Massachusetts, but depending on how the ATF traces guns transferred to my FFL, and long-guns bought legally from FFLs in other states, and private sales from people who haven’t always lived in Mass, these are all legal, but will give that appearance that they came from other states, but in fact they are Massachusetts guns.

The big question is why are they claiming that in past years many guns came from other states when that has never been the case. Probably because that fits the narrative better for their agenda.

Hey, why let truth interfere with claiming terrible laws are good?